Lawmaker says they will introduce a moratorium on new data centers, citing AI risks to jobs and democracy

A lawmaker announced plans to introduce legislation calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers, saying rapid advances in artificial intelligence pose urgent risks to jobs, democratic institutions and public safety. "I will soon be introducing legislation calling for a moratorium on the construction of new data centers," the lawmaker said.

The lawmaker said the nation is "at the beginning of the most profound technological revolution in world history," and warned that the transformation could bring "massive job displacement," harm mental health and change "what it even means to be a human being." The lawmaker attributed several stark predictions to industry leaders to underscore the stakes, and said Congress has so far lacked an adequate policy response.

Quoting industry statements, the lawmaker said Elon Musk warned that "AI and robots will replace all jobs. All jobs. Working will be optional." The lawmaker also cited Dario Amodei of Anthropic as predicting AI could displace "half of all entry‑level white‑collar jobs in the next 1 to 5 years," and said Demis Hassabis of DeepMind has described the AI revolution as potentially "10 times bigger than the industrial revolution and 10 times faster." The lawmaker said Jeff Bezos has pushed Amazon to envision fully automating operations and replacing an estimated 600,000 warehouse workers with robots.

The speech also referenced warnings about civil liberties and existential risk. The lawmaker quoted Larry Ellison as saying AI could produce a surveillance environment in which "citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on," and cited Geoffrey Hinton's estimate of a "10% to 20% chance" that advanced AI could "wipe us out." The lawmaker said Mark Zuckerberg is building a large data center in Louisiana that, in the lawmaker's description, would be "the size of Manhattan" and use "three times the quantity of electricity that the entire city of New Orleans uses every year."

To bolster the policy argument, the lawmaker pointed to a March 2023 open letter, "Pause Giant AI Experiments," cosigned by more than 1,000 industry and academic figures that urged a public, verifiable six‑month pause on training systems more powerful than GPT‑4. The lawmaker said that if such a pause cannot be enacted by industry, "governments should step in and institute a moratorium."

The lawmaker framed the proposed moratorium as aimed at protecting workers, children and public safety and called for a pause to allow lawmakers and regulators to catch up. The speech concluded with a restatement of the moratorium proposal and a call to ensure AI and robotics "work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires." The lawmaker thanked the audience and provided no timeline beyond saying the legislation would be introduced "soon."